Patientenfragen.net - vBSEO Case Study

I wish much success to your site . Thank you for sharing with us your case study.

Best regards.

So, what's your conclusion? Do you recommend vBSEO?

I personally like vBSEO that is why I run it on all my forums.

My traffic growth is very organic so I can't say if this is due to vBSEO or not.
However it did nut hurt either so yeah, I would (and did) recommend it

Just bought my 5th vBSEO License for my newest Project: AdsenseExperts.com

So much for recommendation

That sounds great! I'd love to see a case study similar to the one you did for Patientenfragen.net (Patientenfragen.net - vBSEO Case Study), for the new site, AdsenseExperts.com

Without a doubt it's the most comprehensive case study we've ever had from one of our customers. Kudos! and wishing you great success in your upcoming venture.

Originally Posted by StarBuG

Another update.

Today I did the following changes:
removed Forum Title from Showthread, Forumdisplay and Memberinfo
replaced showpost with permlinks

Could you please explain why you did this and what it meant for your SEO and (Google) referer traffic? I'm wondering why you would leave it your keyword rich domain name?

Also, I'm wondering why you disabled all internal and external nofollow links? I can see why you disabled the internal links (since Matt Cutts/Google explained why you should always have internal follow for pagerank flowing), but I don't understand why you would enable dofollow external links?

Very impressive case study. Your forum and case study is a great inspiration for me

I removed the Forum Title from all Threads because it is noice in the search results.

If someone searches for "I have a cough" then I want to show my threads as:

"I have a cough" and not "I have a cough - Patientenfragen.net ... we have the answeres"

About the rel=nofollow

I spend a lot of thought about it and decided to give it a try.
The internet and SEs thrive on Websites linking to each other.

Why should I tell search engines to not follow all links on my website when they are relevant?
95% of all links on my forum are relevant to the topic and they help users find the answer they are looking for.
So why on earth should google not follow those links?
I think that is what makes some websites authority websites in their niche

But that is pure speculation so far

StarBuG

Originally Posted by StarBuG

I removed the Forum Title from all Threads because it is noice in the search results.
If someone searches for "I have a cough" then I want to show my threads as:
"I have a cough" and not "I have a cough - Patientenfragen.net ... we have the answeres"

I still need to think about this I agree it looks much cleaner, but the forum title also gives context (visitors immediately know what kind of context to expect and what kind of website they're going to visit). E.g. for us a forum thread looks like this:

Code:

Multi tasking iPhone 4 - iPhone Forum - alles over de Apple iPhone, iPad en iPod touch

I think the extra forum title in itself also gives the search result (some) authority.

Although I have to see the idea is very intriguing. Also wondering how other vbSEO forum owners think about this?

About the rel=nofollow

I spend a lot of thought about it and decided to give it a try.
The internet and SEs thrive on Websites linking to each other.

Why should I tell search engines to not follow all links on my website when they are relevant?
95% of all links on my forum are relevant to the topic and they help users find the answer they are looking for.
So why on earth should google not follow those links?
I think that is what makes some websites authority websites in their niche

But that is pure speculation so far

You're absolutely right. I'm going to make the same adjustments, but will selectively nofollow some of our competitors just to be sure

I was under the impression that nofollow only meant 'don't give them link juice in the form of Pagerank', SE-bots will still follow those links. Maybe I'm wrong but take a look at this: nofollow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yeah it is to stop PR flow to a link.
But why would you do that if the link is valuable?
Letting PR flow over links is the original Idea of PR.
If everyone rel=nofollows there links then there is no PR flow anymore.
Think about it.

Can you please give some information about decreasing page loading time?
Do you recommend vBoptimise? Are there other good suggestions?

vBOptimize definitely reduces a lot of DB Queries which reduces the strain on your Server.
In regards to page loading speed I can't really see an effect if I view the page loading
speed graph Google provides in its webmaster tools.

However with guest cache enabled page loading speed for guests is definitely quicker.
As a member my forum was always quick to load so no felt difference there.

Thank you for your answer.

But I don´t really understand your answer clearly.

With guest cache enabled it reduced page loading time? But in Webmastertools there was no effect?


Do you have other optimization tipps?

//Ansonsten gerne auch ne deutsche PN

Guest cache is a feature of vBOptimize.
It caches the html output of every site a guest views for a specific amount of time.
If someone else accesses the same site/thread he will get the cached html version
so your server gets zero db queries to display that page.

In Googles Webmaster Tools you can view your "Website Performance" under Google Labs
that shows you the avarage page load speed Google encountered when crawling your website.

For on page speed optimization get yourself Firebug for Firefox, YSlow and PageSpeed

Note that "site performance" report displays data for real visitors that have Google toolbar installed, not the google bot: Site performance - Webmaster Tools Help